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Originally Posted by filtherton
Speaking of irrelevance, what you wrote is irrelevant to what I wrote. I was just pointing out that sometimes "dragons" exist, even though there isn't evidence of their existence. Speaking of believing things without evidence, how about you presupposing the results of time travel?
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What I was pointing out is that "dragons" didn't exist. While it's certainly possible to postulate something that is true but have no evidence for at the time, your example of 500 years ago doesn't appear to be a good one. It's hard to think of something that was theorized 500 years ago that ended up being correct by our understanding. This is the disingenuous part of your post.
A better example might be
plate techtonics, which was ridiculed at the time for lack of evidence only to later be confirmed correct. Even then, I would contend that non-acceptance of the theory was the right thing to do at the time, minus the ridicule...
My presuppositions on time travel weren't stated without evidence. It's my theory based on what I know of the history of the time and what I know of people. I certainly could have qualified it more and I don't think I'm absolutely right, despite what my confidence might suggest to you...
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Clearly it isn't. You just invented, without any evidence at all, an explanation for how people from the past would respond to our efforts to travel back in time and explain our current scientific theories. You seem to have found use for believing in something without evidence.
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It depends on what you mean by "use." In retrospect, you can always find a "use" for baseless assertions in a broad sense, such as entertainment. What I mean is a more narrow and utilitarian "use," such as making testable predictions...
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But this is assuming that people who "believe things without evidence" just pull things out of thin air. I would imagine that if a person believes in ghosts, they've probably based that belief on whatever evidence they have at hand.
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Well, some of them do pull things out of "thin air" but I will grant that there are people who feel compelled to believe through personal experience so I should probably qualify what I'm saying here.
People's reasons for believing in ghosts aren't as conclusive as their belief in them. There's never any trace of them, there's no known mechanism for them and the experience can never be shared. The idea is absurd on the surface and there's nothing substantiating it underneath...
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Do you think physicists would spend time attempting to find that one theory to explain them all if they didn't think one existed? But why should it exist? There is no evidence that it exists (unless you count the wishy washy philosophical kind of evidence, in which case, there must be a god because Descartes said so).
Do you think that the large hadron collider will yield any sort of useful data? I know a lot of physicists do. I mean, I would hope that somebody thinks it won't be a dead end. Because that's an awful lot of money to spend.
Really, though. Why would anyone expect the LHC to not be a dead end? Dead ends happen all of the time.
The world is a very unscientific place. It has to be. Do you know how complicated it is to show scientifically, as in, here is some peer reviewable scientific evidence, that indoor smoking bans result in an increase in indoor air quality? You can't just be like "Well, it was all smokey in here before the ban, and now it isn't." I mean, you could, but it wouldn't mean anything.
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I don't doubt that the world is an unscientific place. I certainly don't use science to determine every facet of my life. However, there are some claims that are scientific including the existence of certain things. Some of them are debatable while other don't appear to be so. I don't think it's unreasonable to demand scientific evidence for ghosts and dismiss the idea if there isn't any.
Things can and are pursued by hope. Two of the four forces of nature have been unified and it would be nice if the others were too so why not try? One can believe that it's possible and try to do so without believing that it has got to be so. The Hadron collider could very well be a dead end and I think people recognize that, although it can be argued that no new discoveries by the LHC will be, itself, revealing...
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I don't think that you're in a position to speak on behalf of all string theorists or all Christians. Do you have any evidence to support these claims?
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I can't speak for all individuals but I can speak about their shared doctrines. There are official tenets that we may speak about for both disciplines...
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The "unlikeliness" that you refer to here is more philosophy than anything else. It certainly has nothing to do with probability. Probability is irrelevant here. What's your population? The set of all universes? What is the probability that we find ourselves in one where ghosts exist?
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It's certainly not about probability in the strictest sense of the term but we may estimate likelihoods in realms that are not innumerable. If my three year old tells me that she didn't mark up the wall with the crayon in her hand, I find that unlikely...
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You don't need to like to wikipedia like I'm some sort of twat. There is very little evidence correlating the ability to be condescending with the ability to properly form a coherent thought.
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Do you honestly think that my linking wikipedia is condescending? Why? I always thought it was useful. Do a post search on me to see how far this practice goes. Are you looking to be insulted?
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In any case, if you think that these are important and illustrative questions then you need to redirect your focus.
I don't care if dinosaurs are still living on earth. Dinosaur is an arbitrary term-- is Pluto a planet? If someone discovered a dinosaur would we call them dinosaurs? You need to be more precise than a wikipedia article. Is there even consensus among the relevant experts as to the precise definition of the term dinosaur?
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Dinosaur is not
that arbitrary a term. There are traits that would unambiguously categorize something as being a dinosaur and it would be an understatement to say that finding a living specimen would be a big deal...
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Do you think that the laws of thermodynamics are absolute? Seems like they probably are, but, you know, there isn't any actual evidence that they are. I know it's pretty easy to trick yourself into thinking that the fact that you've never known something to be false is evidence that it is always true.
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There is strong evidence that the laws of
thermodynamics are absolutely true. Of course, this doesn't mean that they are absolutely true but, as you say, it really seems that way!
By now, it seems difficult to see exactly where we disagree. I'm starting to think it may be the semantic issue of what constitutes "evidence" or what makes for good reasons for the confidence of assertions...